Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Stuff

Robert Boyd

I was in Fort Worth looking at art, so naturally I went to the Fort Worth Modern in its beautiful, austere Tadao Ando palace. Then I walked across the street to the Kimbell Art Museum with its lovely, rhythmic  Louis Kahn vaults and saw a show of Bernini clay statues. My GPS device showed that Brand 10 Art Space was just a couple of blocks away, right in the same art district. I quickly found it.


Get some donuts and contemporary art (art available at the red arrow)

Brand 10 Art Space is in a strip mall. And this weird fact turns out to be totally appropriate for their current show Stuffed by Hillerbrand+Magsamen, whose work deals with aspects of suburban family life and in this show in particular, the accumulation of stuff that occurs in a suburban home.

(It's absolutely necessary for me to insert a disclaimer here. I not only own a Hillerbrand+Magsamen piece, I own one from this very show--specifically one of the Comfort tapestries.)

This show documents their family's accumulation of stuff, and by extension the culture we live in that encourages this sort of acquisition. Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen have a young son and daughter, and a lot of the stuff they accumulate is kid stuff--plastic toys, stuffed animals, clothes. And young kids have a tendency to expand their stuff to fill every possible bit of space. (I should add that 49-year-old bloggers have the same tendency.) I don't have kids, but my brother's family stayed with me for a couple of months last summer, and even in that short period of time, a layer of little toys gradually spread to every corner of my house like a river's alluvial deposits. It was like a geologic process in super-fast time. That process may have inspired the floor piece Hillerbrand+Magsamen included in the show.


Hillerbrand+Magsamen, untitled, 2013, plastic toys, mostly from McDonalds Happy Meals, dimensions variable

When I saw untitled, I thought of Richard Long and his circles of slate. Long addresses geologic time with such work (slate is a metamorphic rock formed from shale, which is sedimentary), and by analogy Hillerbrand-Magsamen are addressing "mess time". They told me they could have literally filled the gallery with these little plastic geegaws. But making a circle out them is more elegant, and circles suggest infinity.


Hillerbrand+Magsamen, left to right: Comfort: Garage (back), Comfort: Garage (front), 2012, polar fleece blankets, 50" x 50" each

The Comfort series involves taking everything in a given room (for example, all the stuff in their garage), building a wall of the stuff in that room and then photographing it. But the process doesn't stop there--the photograph is then taken to Walmart, who will print your photos onto polar fleece material. I had no idea that this service was available. It's an excellent way to display these photos, because in order to do so, you have to go to Walmart, the platonic ideal delivery system for cheap plastic suburban stuff, and get one more piece of stuff made. (Five more, actually--each of these is an edition of five.)

The word "comfort"  refers to the blankets. The idea of wrapping yourself up in a warm blanket, or Linus and his security blanket from Peanuts come to mind. But the walls of stuff are about comfort as well--we buy things to make ourselves feel better. A wall makes us feel safer. The accumulation of things wards of death. I would argue that the ultimate consumers in modern capitalist America are the so-called "doomers," people who prepare for the collapse of civilization due to any number of factors (climate change, race wars, economic collapse, peak oil, the second coming, Obama--they choose a doom based on their own ideology). Such preparations inherently involve building a bunker and stocking it with stuff--guns, ammo, canned food, freeze-dried food, survival gadgets, etc. They spend ten of thousands of dollars to prepare for a day when money no longer has meaning and death haunts the land. But we are all doomers in a way--spending our way out of obsolescence and unhappiness, cocooning ourselves in the warm embrace of new stuff.

The cycle of stuff doesn't end with producing the polar fleece representations. Once they had made these polar fleece monuments to suburban accumulation, they cut them up and made clothes out of them.


Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Comfort: Ode to Beuys: Family Suiting, 2013, polar fleece


Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Comfort: Ode to Beuys: Family Suiting, 2013, polar fleece

These clothes are an Ode to Beuys in that they obviously reflect Joseph Beuy's own felt suit. The (dubious) mythology around Beuys is that he was wrapped with felt and fat when he was rescued by Tatars after crashing in a dive bomber in Russia during World War II. Felt therefore represented rescue and  salvation for Beuys. In Comfort: Ode to Beuys, it represents comfort, but also safety--not safety in a literal sense, but the psychological sense of safety and completeness we get from acquiring stuff. Jesus may have preached that one should leave all this stuff behind, but there is a reason that the "prosperity gospel" appeals so strongly to suburban America. Having stuff is important to us. These clothes reflect that.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen's art is both bourgeois and a critique of being bourgeois. As a document of their family's lifestyle, it is a picture of suburban plenty. And in a way, that is unusual. I remember reading an essay about writer William Trevor where the author said that the bohemianism of Allen Ginsberg (for example) was what you expected. You imagine an artist will not be a homme moyen sensuel. For this author, the very ordinariness of William Trevor was, in the context of artists, highly exotic.

(I want to emphasize that I know nothing of the actual lifestyle of the Hillerbrand+Magsamen family beyond what they chosen to depict in their artwork. So when I use descriptive words like "bourgeois" or "suburban," it's really about the work itself.)

By creating art like this seemingly from within this world--suburban, acquisitive, bourgeois--Hillerbrand+Magsamen are better placed to understand that world. Their critiques are gentle and not savage, but carry more weight than they would if they were coming from a place wholly outside the world of modern suburban America. Their work demonstrates a knowledge of art and an equal knowledge of Happy Meals, and is expressed with real humor.

Stuffed is up at Brand 10 Art Space through March 23.

Pan Recommends for the week of July 26 through August 1

Here are a few things opening in the next seven days that caught our eye.

Silence at the Menil, opens today, Thursday, July 26. Features Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, David Hammons, Tehching Hsieh, Jennie C. Jones, Jacob Kirkegaard, René Magritte, Mark Manders, Christian Marclay, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, Robert Rauschenberg, Doris Salcedo, Tino Sehgal, and others. (And presumably de Chirico is part of the show since Melancholia is used to illustrate the web page for Silence.)

Sigur Rós: INNI at the Aurora Picture Show, Friday July 7, 7 pm (screening at 8 pm). This is going to include Two Star Symphony as the warm-up act. I'm not sure how to describe Sigur Rós, so I decided to outsource that task to the hive-mind of Google search:


Well, OK. Maybe that wasn't a good idea. Let's just say Sigur Rós is post-minimalist prog rock. (Don't forget that the Aurora Picture Show is now at 2442 Bartlett.)

Drawings and Air Conditioning at Front Gallery,  opens Saturday, July 28, 5 pm to 7 pm. Features Michael Blair, Biff Bolen, Clarence Chun, Megan Harrison and Erin Hunt.

Naked Tutu-Tuesday at Notsuoh featuring Cello Fury on Tuesday (duh), July 31, 7 pm. Performance art and nudity (two great things that go great together) upstairs at Notsuoh. "Bring your naked self and your Tutus to Notsuoh on Tuesday July 31st for an evening of ballet, music, and audience participatory performance art featuring Cello Fury from Pittsburg, PA and Continuum, a local Houston performance art troupe (who will also lead a movement workshop)."

Did we miss anything good? Let us know in the comments!

Thinkin' About Performance Art

by Robert Boyd



Last weekend, I saw several pieces of performance art. It got me thinking about how to think about performance art. How is a particular kind of performance art different from another? This is a framework I created over the weekend to help me think about it.

The first thing that got me thinking was Jorge Galvan's sculpture/performance El Dinersito at Pan y Circos, the show I curated with Zoya Tommy. The performance part was that Galvan made tacos for the opening night attendees. This seems typical of that subcategory of performance art called relational art, of whom Rirkrit Tiravanijia is the most prominent practitioner. But I also recalled sitting at the bar at Notsuoh and being told by Jim Pirtle that he considered his bar/live music venue to be a piece of "social sculpture." The term was created by Joseph Beuys and it was broader than just performance, but included a lot of performance. Gordon Matta-Clark's restaurant Food seems to fall into this broad category. Likewise, the artistic practices lumped into the category of social practice seem closely related. So these all became one of the circles in my Venn diagram.

Also this weekend, I saw a solo performance by Nancy Douthey (about which more in a subsequent post). Her performance was completely different--categorically different--from Jorge Galvan's. It was more of a theater piece--she wore a costume and took on a persona (or personas, really), and spoke lines. I don't know if the lines were written in advance or if they were improvised, but what I saw was fundamentally acting. And this seems to be a big part of performance. And to put it more broadly, there seems to be a big and important strain of performance art that has evolved from traditional stage arts--theater, dance, stand-up, etc.

But all performance doesn't fit into those two categories. When Marina Abramovič and Ulay slapped each other in the face over and over (Light/Dark, 1977), when Chris Burden had himself nailed to a VW Bug, when Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour for an entire year (Time Clock Piece, 1980-81), they were neither "acting" nor were they particularly "relating". These pieces involved endurance. The prehistory of these pieces could be found in shamanic practices, in the extremities that yogis undergo, in the various deprivations and self-scourging of medieval holy men. In many of these pieces, there is a spiritual aspect--extreme repetition is like reciting a mantra, for example. But not all endurance pieces are spiritual--the Art Guys sitting in a Denny's drinking coffee for 24 hours, for example. And not all ritualistic pieces are about endurance--Judy Chicago's atmospheres, for example. But broadly speaking, I think we can group endurance pieces and ritualistic pieces together.

But, you ask, aren't these categories kind of fuzzy? Can't a piece fall into any two of the above categories, or even all three of them? Sure--that's why I depict it as a Venn diagram. The Art Guys sitting in Denny's was an endurance piece, but it was also a relational piece. Endurance pieces can also be theatrical--there is a whole tradition of this in the circus and in acrobatic performances.

I'm sure for those of you who have really studied performance theory and practice, this will seem a bit simplistic. But it's just a framework--a way to think about what I'm seeing.

New Acquisitions--Bernar Venet and Joseph Beuys (sort of...)

I have bought art through eBay and through Heritage Auctions. So I decided to take a look and see what other internet auctions were out there. I went to this site called Live Auctioneers. What it does is host auctions for various galleries, etc. It's a little like Alibris, an online bookseller of used and collectible books that puts the stock of many different antiquarian and used booksellers up in one place. I've had lots of success with Alibris, so I thought I'd give Live Auctioneers a try.

They were representing a Belgian gallery called Art Partner Gallerie. They were having a show of contemporary art, and as I looked at the lots, I decided--just to try it out--I'd put in a couple of small bids. I bid on a Bernar Venet silkscreen (I had seen a similar one recently at McClain Gallery) and a pair of "postcards" by Joseph Beuys.


Bernar Venet, Planche Mathematique 01, silkscreen on polycarbonate, edition of 60, 2002

This thing is huge--80 x 120 cm. That was clear on the lot description, but now I have a piece that really is too big for me to hang! Oh, well. I'm satisfied. I got a bargain for it, if the prices for other "planches mathematiques" I see online are accurate.

Bernar Venet is, of course, best known for his giant metal sculptures, such as the ones in Hermann Park, at the McClain Gallery, or in front of the home of John and Becca Thrash. He also guest-starred in a really funny episode of The Madness of Art.

So that was the good part of this experiment. Here's the bad part.







These are two Joseph Beuys postcards, produced by Edition Staeck. One is on wood, the other on Beuy's trademark thick felt. The description of the lot is here. Now my mistake in bidding on these was to not do any research. If I had, I would have learned from the Editions Staeck website that there were 100 signed and numbered postcards in this edition, but the unsigned cards are "unlimited." In this case, "unlimited" is a word that means they can produce as many as the public wants.

Then I would have looked closely at the lot description and the accompanying photo, and realized that these were not signed and numbered (unlike the Venet). So even though I didn't bid much for these things, I bid more than they are worth. I could have bought them straight from Edition Staeck for significantly less than what I actually paid for them.

Well, all in all, I came out ahead. And I learned a valuable lesson--do the research before you buy!